18 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



excavation, and only too often that information is fragmen- 

 tary and obviously insufficient. The known instrumental 

 equipment of the Egyptians seems scarcely sufficient for the 

 great engineering works which they undertook. Was Galileo 

 or his immediate predecessor really the first to combine two 

 lenses to make a telescope? While we should certainly not 

 accept the existence of such instruments in much earlier 

 times without adequate evidence, we should as certainly not 

 regard their existence as impossible. 



Again, in the absence of definite records, historians tend 

 to overrate the isolation of countries and cultures in early 

 times. It is true that in the early part of a cycle of culture, as 

 in Greece in the eighth century B.C., contact with other coun- 

 tries was largely lost. Six hundred years earlier, however, 

 communications between Egypt, Babylonia, and Asia Minor 

 were so good that there was something approximating a postal 

 service, and because of its convenience correspondents in all 

 these countries used a common language— Babylonian written 

 in the cuneiform script. The visit of a Pharaoh of the Old 

 Kingdom to Crete, imagined by Miss Grant in her novel, 

 while unlikely, is certainly not impossible.* 



To get a true view of the pattern of history, it is necessary 

 to broaden our outlook as much as possible and to cover not 

 only the whole of recorded history but also the prehistory of 

 the archaeologist. As Childe says: 'Tor the prehistorian, the 

 colonization of the Mediterranean basin by the Phoenicians 

 and the Greeks is but the continuation of the Minoans' pio- 

 neering efforts. To the historian, the empires of Assyria, 

 Babylon, Persia, and Macedon must appear fulfillments of 

 the ambitions of Sargon of Agade, Ur-Nammu, and Ham- 

 murabi." 



When we attempt to contemplate history broadly, to com- 

 pare the events of one period with those of another, there is 

 a strong tendency to distortion arising from the point of view. 

 It is almost as if the difficulty were one of perspective. Sup- 



* Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh, New York, Harper and Brothers, 

 1938. 



